


be unbroken (or be brave again)

by ussihavelovedthestarstoofondly



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/F, F/M, tw: rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:41:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22191979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ussihavelovedthestarstoofondly/pseuds/ussihavelovedthestarstoofondly
Summary: There were many things Peggy expected from her arrival home: a simple dinner, a cup of tea, maybe a warm bath if she felt like indulging herself. A gun, disassembled with the magazine sitting next to it on her entryway table, is not one of them.There’s a woman sitting at Peggy’s tiny kitchen table. In the yellow glow of the street lamp she looks terrible, like she’s standing on the stoop of Death’s door. Peggy almost doesn’t recognize her, probably wouldn’t have, but she’s spent long enough staring at the one grainy, pixelated surveillance photo, the only proof of her existence, to recognize her.***Bucky watches as two people walk out of the compound, standing out front, waiting for them. When they get closer, he sees it’s Steve and Natasha. Steve grins.“Bucky!” Steve yells, and comes bounding down the steps. It feels like running into a wall when Steve slams into him. He closes his eyes, and relishes the feeling.“Didn’t you used to be smaller?” Bucky manages to croak out, as he winds his arms around the blond.
Relationships: Bucky Barnes/ OC, Bucky Barnes/ Raizel Solecki, Peggy Carter/ Raizel Solecki, peggy carter/ oc
Kudos: 2





	be unbroken (or be brave again)

**Author's Note:**

> Please take note of these trigger warnings:   
> dubious consent  
> Forced abortion   
> graphic violence  
> very very bad coping skills  
> discussion of concentration camps  
> hinted at child murders. 
> 
> This story takes a long time to get happy, ok?
> 
> Considering writing little other snippets in the universe so let me know if you'd want them or have any good ideas for them.

_ There were many things Peggy expected from her arrival home: a simple dinner, a cup of tea, maybe a warm bath if she felt like indulging herself. A gun, disassembled with the magazine sitting next to it on her entryway table, is not one of them.  _

_ There’s a woman sitting at Peggy’s tiny kitchen table. In the yellow glow of the street lamp she looks terrible, like she’s standing on the stoop of Death’s door. Peggy almost doesn’t recognize her, probably wouldn’t have, but she’s spent long enough staring at the one grainy, pixelated surveillance photo, the only proof of her existence, to recognize her.  _

_ The woman at the table has been a terror in the intelligence community since just before the end of the war when whispers of her finally got back to Peggy and SHIELD. The rumors around her claimed she had abilities greater than Steve’s. Peggy wasn’t sure she believed that. A different skill set, maybe, built to be a spy and not a soldier. But stronger than Captain America? Faster? Peggy didn’t believe that.  _

_ She was rumored to be a Soviet agent, or maybe Italian, perhaps even German, it all depended on who you asked. The one thing everyone in the intelligence community is thinking, but no one dares say it, is that she’s Hydra. Now, though, Peggy knows she’s Hydra. Can feel it in her bones.  _

_ The black of the woman’s eye’s flashes in the light of a passing car. She flinches when Peggy turns on the light, and it’s only then that Peggy notices the blood. The woman is covered in it, old dried blood, and fresh blood covering her lap and slowly dripping onto the floor. She looks tired, Peggy thinks.  _

_ “I will not hurt you,” she says. Her accent is thick, and she trips over the word ‘hurt’. It’s Eastern European but Peggy can’t be more specific. The woman doesn’t look scared, Peggy knows that; knows what fear looks like, but the woman looks something decidedly not threatening. Tired maybe.  _

_ “Sure. Did you tell all the people you killed that?” Peggy asks her. The woman moves like she’s going to stand, but her face scrunches up and she makes a quiet sound of pain. The table makes a cracking sound, and Peggy can see where it has cracked and splintered under where her right hand is curled around it. Peggy’s fingers curl around her gun. The woman slowly lowers back into the chair. _

_ “I am here to tell you I want out. I am done being a killer on a leash.” Her voice is firm but rough. It sounds like she hasn’t used it in a while. Peggy takes a few steps deeper into the apartment. The woman has her left arm pressed against her lower abdomen. It seems to be where the blood is coming from.  _

_ “You’ve worked with Hydra for almost eighteen years. Rumor has it you’ve killed almost thirty people. What changed?” The woman tilts her head up to look at Peggy.  _

_ “Thirty?” She asks.  _

_ “Yes. What’s your name?” The woman’s mouth pulls down. Her eyes look vacant, like no one's home. A body with no soul.  _

_ “What do you think my name is?” She asks.  _

_ “I don’t know,” Peggy tells her. She tilts her chin up, like she’s daring Peggy to doubt her.  _

_ “Raizel,” she says. Peggy nods.  _

_ “Ok Raizel,” Peggy says. Peggy takes a deep breath and tries to process what the hell is happening right now.  _

***

Fury looks up, and feels his stomach sink. He won’t admit that the woman in front of him terrifies him, at least not aloud, and he’s sure as hell terrified of her right now. He’s lied to her, and based on the look on her face she knows it. 

“I thought you retired,” Nick tells her, and goddamn Nick has never instantly regretted words so much in his life as he stands up. 

Tony Stark, for once in his damn life, has the grace of common sense to stay silent in the corner of the room where he’d stood up to look out the window. 

Nick isn’t fooling himself into thinking that the woman is unaware of Stark’s presence, more that she is simply unconcerned with his existence right now. 

Nick watches as she grabs the desk one handed and throws it into the opposite wall. He doesn’t see the right hook coming, but he feels the drywall crack behind him as he slams into it. It’s a threat, he knows. He heard enough vague references from Carter about her to know if she really tried she would have shattered his jaw if not broken his neck in the process. 

There was another thing Carter had made sure to remind him about the woman with black eyes: if Raizel Solecki wanted you dead, you’d be dead, no buts, what’s, or ifs about it. 

“The only reason,” she growls as she presses the flat of a knife against Nick’s face, “you’re alive, is because I think you might be useful later. You lose that potential, and you’re dead. Am I clear?” Nick swallows and nods. 

“Yes. Very clear,” she tilts her head and stands up before slowly turning to look at where Tony Stark is standing in the corner. He raises both eyebrows at her. Her eyes rake over him. 

Nick recognizes the language she says as Spanish, but she speaks too quickly and too quietly for him to comprehend. It makes Tony’s eyes widen, and he drops the glass he’s holding on the floor. 

“What did you just say?” He hisses out. Raizel sighs and shakes her head. 

“I’m sorry.” And she turns and walks out of the office, leaving chaos in her wake. 

***

Natasha is ashamed to say she didn’t know she was being followed, and that the hand tightening on her shoulder startles her. 

“Natalia Romanova I need that file,” a voice growls. Natasha doesn’t recognize the woman who slides into the seat across from her. Also worrying. 

“I think you’ve got the wrong person,” Natasha says, smiling. 

“I know about the Red Room. I know how Clint Barton picked up the sad murder orphan instead of killing you as he was supposed to do. I know you have a file you composed looking for James Buchanan Barnes.” Natasha can say, that for the first time in quite possibly ever, or at least a in a very long time, she is completely blindsided. She stares quietly at the woman across from her, who leans back and crosses her arms. 

Natasha thinks it’s weird that she’s wearing a long sleeved shirt in the middle of summer. Natasha pulls out the file, and slowly slides it across the table. The woman reaches for it, and Natasha pulls it back just a hair. The woman raises an eyebrow. 

“Why do you want to find him?” Natasha asks. The corner of the woman’s mouth twitches. Her face goes blank. 

“Think about what you know about the White Wolf. I’m sure you’ll come up with something,” the woman says. She stands up and takes the file with her. Natasha grabs the woman’s wrist as she walks by. 

“You’re the White Lady,” Natasha says. The woman’s chin dips. 

“So that’s what they called me, then? A wolf and a lady. A matching pair.” Natasha thinks her voice sounds wet, like she’s trying not to cry. 

“You didn’t know that he’s still alive, did you?” Natasha asks. 

“You’ve clearly heard rumors. Do you really think I would have left him?” 

“Rumors are rumors. And I’d say you two are more ghost stories than rumours.” The woman’s eyes are very dark, black almost. She simply nods. 

“What happened to you? What happened to the two of you?” Natasha asks. The woman pulls her wrist out of Natasha’s grasp. 

“Don’t go digging up bones, Natasha. I’m standing in the middle of a graveyard.” With that warning hanging in the air, the woman walks away. Natasha feels her heart break for James and the White Lady. Natasha still doesn’t know her name. Natasha doesn’t think anybody does. 

She thinks about how lonely that would be: to know that no one knows who you are, what your name is. To have so much history and no one to care about it. She thinks about how alone she would feel without the Avengers. Without Steve and Tony and Wanda. 

When her coffee and scone are placed in front of her, Natasha finds she’s lost her appetite. 

***

He isn’t surprised she found him. Disappointed, maybe. Not disappointed that she found him, but disappointed that it didn’t take her longer. She had wrangled him into the truck, and started driving. 

He hadn’t questioned her, and she had brought him back to her cabin at the little ranch she had tucked so far into the foothills of the Rocky Mountains that it should just be considered in the mountains at this point. 

“If you try to say I’m sorry…” she lets the threat hang in the air. 

“I am,” he tells her. He sees the corners of her mouth pull down. 

“If you want to point blame, James Barnes, then it lies on me. I never should have come back. You got us out. I should have taken that and run with it but I didn’t and it cost a life,” she tells him. He swallows hard. 

“Why didn’t you?” He asks. He sees her turn away from him, back to the stove where she’s making tea. “Why do you still use linden flowers?” He asks. He watches her spine tighten, and he can practically see her eyes squeezing shut. 

***

_ She looks up as the White Wolf walks closer. She reaches up, and carefully undoes the straps for the mask.  _

_ “Ok?” She asks. The Russian now sounds comfortable on her tongue, like the words no longer hold a sour taste.  _

_ “Yes,” he whispers. The rain isn’t heavy now, just a thick mist clinging to the trees and any exposed skin. She nods once, and follows him through the forest.  _

_ It drops abruptly, a cliff looking over the road. When Barnes lies down on his stomach, she follows suit.  _

_ “After this, I saw an abandoned building a couple hundred yards back,” He offers.  _

_ “They’ll kill is if they find out what we’re doing,” she tells him.  _

_ “No, they’ll do worse than kill us,” he warns her. He pauses, then adds, “do you care?” She presses closer to his side, thinks about the comfort, the control, the feeling that maybe, just maybe, she has some say in anything.  _

_ “No.” Short. Simple. “Do you?”  _

_ “Not anymore,” he says. She takes a tentative breath.  _

_ “You don’t remember anymore,” she guesses.  _

_ “Just that I was somebody else. A good man,” he tells her. “Do you remember?” She takes a deep breath. He doesn’t look away from the scope of the rifle but she knows he can feel it, the expansion of her ribs. What he doesn’t know is how she tastes the flames, the iron and ash as she breathes in the rain forest air.  _

_ “Too much,” she tells him. They fall silent when they hear the sound of tires on the wet pavement. She stands up, and the white dress falls to her knees. Barnes spares a glance at her feet, muddy, bruised and bloody.  _

_ He doesn’t respond, and she walks to the cliffs edge, and jumps. _

***

_ “Christ almighty,” Peggy hisses when she feels fingers hook into the back of her skirt. The woman doesn’t look remorseful when Peggy turns to glare at her. “You need to stop scaring me like that,” Peggy admonishes. Raizel just tilts her head and shrugs. Peggy doesn’t think the woman is capable of smiling anymore, that she probably hasn’t been for a long time.  _

_ “You don’t give me very good incentive to stop,” she says, and leans forward. Peggy kisses her hard, bites her bottom lip and tugs. Peggy starts pulling Raizel’s shirt loose from her pants as Raizel twists her hands in Peggy’s skirt and starts towards the bedroom.  _

_ “We have to stop this. Before people get suspicious,” Peggy tells her. Raizel quirks an eyebrow before throwing Peggy onto the bed, and dropping down over her, hands planted in line with Peggy’s head. Peggy yanks at Raizel’s belt, belying her own words.  _

_ “Who’s going to get suspicious? I’m dead, remember? One of the six million other victims of Hitler’s regime? And the White Lady? Well, no one ever really believe in her anyway,” Raizel says. Peggy frowns at her, before flipping them over to sit on Raizel’s hips.  _

_ Peggy likes that Raizel lets Peggy throw her around. Peggy knows full well that if Raizel didn’t want to be moved, she wouldn’t be.  _

_ Raizel sits up and pulls Peggy’s shirt over her head, and tosses it on the floor, her bra following shortly after. Peggy kisses her again, because she can, because Raizel trusts Peggy enough to let her kiss her. She sighs as Raizel kisses down her neck, careful to leave no marks.  _

_ Raizel makes up for the lack of marks when she flips them over and slides lower, licking along Peggy’s stomach, kissing and biting hard enough to leave teeth marks. When Raizel gets to Peggy’s thighs, she looks up and smirks before diving under Peggy’s skirt.  _

_ *** _

“You have to call him.” Bucky looks up to see Raizel handing him a cup of coffee. He thinks it’s a peace offering. “Steve,” she adds as if that’s not obvious, as if this isn’t a conversation he hasn’t been actively avoiding. 

He looks out the front window as she sits down next to him on the couch. He watches the snow fall. It can’t touch them in here, not with coffee and the crackling fire in front of them. 

“I’m serious. I didn’t drag you back here to watch you waste away hiding in this cabin. Steve deserves better than that.  _ You  _ deserve better than that.” Bucky closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and slowly lets it out. He wishes she had dragged him back to stay here with her. He wishes he could pick her up and carry her to the bedroom, spend weeks rememorizing her body, enjoying that they have time and space and safety now to do so. But she doesn’t deserve that, not after what he’s put her through. 

“I will. Call.” It sounds broken even to his own ears. He doesn’t want to call. He wants to stay with her. He takes a sip of coffee. It burns through his chest. 

“If you don’t call by the time the snow melts off the road, I’m dragging you there by force.” The unfortunate part of that scenario, Bucky thinks, is that it’s entirely within the realm of possibility. 

They sit and listen to the fire and drink coffee. 

“When were you born?” Bucky suddenly asks her. She tilts her head to look at him. 

“1920,” she tells him. 

“I’m three years older than you,” he tells her. He’s not sure why that surprises him. She just hums in response. 

“Where were you born?” He asks her. She looks sad, and he feels privileged that she allows him to see that emotion. 

“Outside of Warsaw. Poland.” He doesn’t need to ask to know where that road leads. He’s seen the numbers on her arm. He knows what they mean. Bucky feels his stomach drop. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “For what happened to you.” Her fingers tighten on the mug. She stares into the fire. 

“What about you? Where were you born?” She asks. Bucky swallows and picks at the skin next to his nail. 

“Brooklyn,” he tells her. “Oldest of four,” He adds. She smiles, and it hurts somewhere deep in the left side of his chest to see it. 

“My son was proud to be an older brother, too.” There’s a grief in her face that Bucky knows time will never fix. He wonders if it looked the same on his mother. “There is no curse greater than to outlive your own children,” she says. It sounds like condemnation. 

***

_ Raizel holds Marian tight against her as they’re forced onto the train.  _

_ “Mama, Mama,” Oskar says, pulling on her skirt. Shevah picks him up, presses closer to Raizel and Marian. A baby cries, and an old woman is moaning in the car. Raizel grabs her husband’s belt and pulls him close keeping their kids between them.  _

_ “It’s just for a short time,” Shevah tells her. “We’ll be ok.” Raizel wants to believe him, but the door on the train closes, and she knows that something is wrong.  _

_ “Papa, where are we going?” Oskar asks. Shevah manages a small smile for his four year old son.  _

_ “A place where we can all be together,” Shevah says. Oskar runs his fingers over the yellow star in Shevah’s shirt. Raizel can feel the tears in her eyes, so she leans forwards to rest her face against Shevah’s shoulder. She has to stay strong for her children, for her son and her little girl who’s finally stopped crying because she is asleep on Raizel’s shoulder.  _

_ The train ride is long, cold wind blowing in through the slats. Raizel doesn’t miss that it’s a cattle car, and neither does Shevah based on the look on his face.  _

_ “I’m sorry,” he whispers. She hears the unsaid “that I couldn’t protect you”, “that I couldn’t keep the kids safe”, “that we didn’t get a normal life” hidden in the silence following his words. It sounds too much like goodbye.  _

_ “I love you. I forgive you,” Raizel tells him because what else can she say? Shevah is a good man and a great husband and a wonderful father but he couldn’t have kept the Third Reich away from their door forever.  _

_ When the trail rattles to a stop, Shevah and Raizel pretend they don’t hear the few screams, the few gunshots.  _

_ They’re separated by the guards, Shevah holding Oskar tight to him. Raizel kisses Shevah hard, kisses Oskar.  _

_ “Be good for Papa. I love you,” she whispers against his head. The men with guns push her and Marian away from her son and her husband.  _

_ She watches Shevah mouth “I love you,” and Raizel can only watch in terror as they’re herded in separate directions by guns.  _

_ *** _

_ “What happened to you?” Peggy asks as they lay in bed. She runs her fingers over the numbers on Raizel’s arm. 65312 stamped into the skin on Raizel’s arm with a triangle underneath, the tip of the triangle nestled between the five and the three. It’s cursed to look as fresh as they day it was put there.  _

_ “It doesn’t matter,” Raizel tells her. Peggy doesn’t miss how Raizel lays over her, like she’s shielding her. It speaks to trauma, Peggy thinks.  _

_ “I know what these numbers are,” Peggy tells her. Raizel sits up at that, and cocks her head to look at Peggy.  _

_ “Do you?” She asks. Peggy feels it’s a threat and true curiosity all in one.  _

_ “Yes,” Peggy tells her. Raizel stands up then, and walks over towards the closet. Peggy sees the long lines of scars running down Raizel’s back like water over rocks, ones Peggy’s felt before, but there’s something so much more horrible about them in the daylight. They’re real here, not just hard to see phantoms under her fingertips.  _

_ “No you don’t. You think you do, and you’ve seen war, but you don’t know,” Raizel says. Peggy watches as she pulls on the underwear and bra they had discarded last night. For once, Raizel has complied when Peggy asked her to stay. “I hate when people say that you’ve lost a child. They make it sound like there’s a chance you’ll get them back.” Peggy feels her stomach drop as Raizel turns and her words register.  _

_ Peggy wants to ask “how many of your children did they kill?” But she can’t make the words come out. They’re too blunt, too unfeeling. So Peggy just stares at the ragged scar running from hip bone to hip bone on Raizel’s stomach and suddenly the blood from the first night Raizel was in Peggy’s apartment makes more sense, suddenly the blood all over Peggy’s floor makes terrible sense. Suddenly, “I don’t want to be a killer on a leash” makes sense.  _

_ “They cut your baby out of you,” Peggy gasps. Raizel doesn’t say anything as she pulls on her pants, and carefully tucks her shirt into them. The silence is damning. “Oh god,” Peggy whispers. “I’m so sorry.” Raizel frowns at that, tightening and then buckling her belt.  _

_ “What for? You couldn’t have stopped the murder of any of my children,” she says. Peggy feels sick, can feel the bile in her throat.  _

_ “How many did they kill?” She gasps.  _

_ “Of mine? Or in total?” Raizel says.  _

_ “Yours,” Peggy whispers. She watches Raizel’s face harden, all the humanity falling away. _

_ Peggy can see the killer now, she can see the White Lady, feel the terror her victims must have felt, can feel the rage that fueled it.  _

_ “The Nazi’s killed the first two. Hydra killed the last one,” she says. Peggy can’t hold eye contact anymore, too worried she’ll throw up. _

_ “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she repeats. When she can look up again, Raizel is gone.  _

***

“Was it a boy or a girl?” Bucky asks her as they wash dishes. 

“I don’t know,” Raizel tells him. “They didn’t. Uh.” She stops and Bucky can’t help it, he wraps his arm around her shoulders, pulls her close, and kisses the top of her head, burying his nose in her hair. He wants to say “I love you” and it’s on the tip of his tongue but he doesn’t. 

***

_ “What do you mean, you don’t have the file?” Steve growls. Natasha shrugs, and takes a sip of coffee.  _

_ “There’s someone out there more determined to find him that you. And they’re a lot scarier than you are,” Natasha tells him. Steve feels his jaw work. “Besides, if she does find him, and if anyone can it’s her, she’ll make sure to drag his sorry ass back here, to you. She won’t let him get away with not seeing you.” Steve feels his stomach twist. He’s let down his best friend before, and now he’s being forced to do it again, for someone he doesn’t know.  _

_ “Natasha I can’t do this to him.” She sighs, and Steve sees her mouth pinch as she musters patience for the next part of the conversation.  _

_ “Steve, there wasn’t anything in that file. Nothing you could have done anything with. She might be able to. She’s still connected to that world in ways I am not. Trust that she wants what’s best for him as much as you do.” Steve takes a deep breath. It’s shakier than he’d like, and his throat is sore with impending tears. Natasha squeezes his hand.  _

_ “She’ll find him. Trust me.”  _

***

“I can’t believe you’re making me do this,” Bucky murmurs. The corner of her mouth quirks. 

“It’s not too late for me to pull over and tie you up in the back seat,” she warns him. The corner of his mouth twitches. 

They park in the empty six-space parking lot, and walk towards the massive gate. Bucky shoves his hands in his jean pockets. 

Raizel presses the intercom button. She’s surprised when the gate swings open. 

“Just remember: I’m faster than you are,” she warns Bucky. Bucky tries to grin at her, and it falls flat. 

“I’m sure you weren’t as smooth when you got out, doll,” he tells her, the term of endearment slipping out. She shrugs, pushing her hands into the pockets of her Carhartt jacket. There’s still patches of snow in the shade. 

“I had help,” she says, emphasizing the last word as they walk towards the large compound. Bucky nods once. 

“You’re a pain in the ass,” he tells her. She shrugs, entirely unrepentant. Bucky watches as two people walk out of the compound, standing out front, waiting for them. When they get closer, he sees it’s Steve and Natasha. Steve grins.

“Bucky!” Steve yells, and comes bounding down the steps. It feels like running into a wall when Steve slams into him. He closes his eyes, and relishes the feeling. 

“Didn’t you used to be smaller?” Bucky manages to croak out, as he winds his arms around the blond. 

***

_ Raizel knows that this is a stupid idea, but she can’t find it in herself to care. Peggy is missing. So, like the smart asshole that he is, Fury had called her. Which is frustrating because she has better things to be doing right now, like planting winter squash in her garden, and not kicking through warehouse doors and slamming people into walls hard enough to fracture their skulls.  _

_ She isn’t sure what it says about her that she wears the White Lady tactical gear that she’d fled Hydra in. Apparently enough rumors about her still existed to inspire fear though because the guards had cowered against the wall, one even punching another to get away when they realized that she wasn’t going to leave any survivors.  _

_ The first thing Raizel sees when she slams open the bolted door is Peggy is tied to a chair. Raizel seethes when she sees the blood on her. The man closest to Peggy, who has the misfortune to be holding her shirt, hauled back and ready to punch her again, is the first that Raizel kills. After that, it’s just which ever bastard is unlucky enough to be within arms reach. _

_ Once she’s sure that there’s no one left, Raizel turns to Peggy, and cuts the rope tying her to the chair. She freezes as Peggy reaches up and slowly undoes the white mask.  _

_ “You don’t have to wear that anymore.” Peggy tells her. Raizel pulls back and frowns at her.  _

_ “I chose to,” she says, and it’s not quite a truth, and not quite a lie. Peggy looks sad, but she doesn’t say anything. She lets Raizel pick her up. Peggy sleeps through most of the trek back to the car.  _

_ Raizel has been shot in the chest before. Several times, actually, and sometimes with more than one bullet. She thinks that the knowledge that Peggy trusts her enough to sleep in her arms feels a lot like being shot in the chest.  _

_ Raizel is careful as she loads Peggy into the car. She carefully pulls on a coat over her uniform, and pretends it doesn’t hurt to drive Peggy back to the airport where Nick and Peggy’s husband are waiting.  _

***

Natasha watches as the woman, the White Lady who never gave her name, walks past Bucky and Steve to come stand next to Natasha. 

“You did something good here today,” Natasha tells her. A strange look crosses the woman’s face. 

“I think it will help him,” she says. 

“What’s your name?” Natasha asks. The woman rolls her shoulders. 

“Raizel,” she says. She says it like there’s weight to it, like its a curse. Natasha nods once. The woman turns to look at the two men. 

“Are you staying here?” Natasha asks. Raizel shrugs. 

“I have better things I could be doing,” she says. It’s not a yes, and it’s not a no. 

***

_ Peggy frowns at Raizel where she’s standing in the kitchen. Raizel looks like shit. Her jeans seem looser to Peggy, and dark purple splotches are smudged under her eyes. The sweater she’s wearing keeps slipping off of her left shoulder as she cuts potatoes for soup.  _

_ “Are you ok?” Peggy asks her. Raizel glances over her shoulder, but she doesn’t look at Peggy, she looks at the wall past her. Peggy knows that she looks older, knows there’s grey in her hair and lines on her face, running SHIELD will do that to anyone, but Raizel looks like she hasn’t aged a day.  _

_ “I am fine,” she says. Peggy doesn’t believe her for a minute.  _

_ “You know that it’s wrong to lie right?” Peggy asks her. She sees Raizel roll her shoulders.  _

_ “What do you want me to say Peggy? Telling the truth isn’t going to fix anything.”  _

_ “Why are you mad at me?” Peggy asks her.  _

_ “I’m not mad, Peggy. I’m tired.”  _

_ “Then why are you up?” Peggy demands, glancing at the clock to ensure that it is in fact three am, and regrets it when Raizel stiffens, her body tightening. Peggy watches as she slowly sets down the knife, and turns. Raizel doesn’t just look tired, Peggy thinks. She looks dead on her feet.  _

_ “And why are you here at three am, Peggy?” She asks.  _

_ “I have a mission. I want your help,” Peggy tells her. She watches Raizel’s eyes flash like she’s gearing up for a fight, but then her shoulders drop, the fire in Raizel’s eyes goes out, and the corners of her mouth pull down. She looks like a strong wind would topple her over.  _

_ “Truth? Do you want the truth Peggy Carter?” She asks. Peggy swallows, and feels like she’s watching her foot drop straight into a bear trap.  _

_ “Yes,” she says anyway because otherwise she’s sure that this will come back to bite her in the ass. She thinks this very well may come back to bite her in the ass anyway. She watches Raizel take a deep breath, and braces for the jaws of the bear trap to snap shut.  _

_ “I left Hydra because they killed my baby. Because to them I was I tool. So I left and then I came to SHIELD who preaches to be everything Hydra isn’t. And guess what? I’m a tool here, too. A weapon at your beck and call. I’m tired, Peggy. I’m tired of fighting fights that aren’t mine. Who knows how long I’ll live? It’s been a long time already. And I don’t want to spend it fighting for other people.” Peggy stays quiet, and stares at the counter top. She swallows before starting to speak.  _

_ “I’m sorry you feel that way,” Peggy says. Raizel scoffs and tilts her head up, and Peggy realizes with a distant horror that Raizel is crying. Peggy made an assassin cry. This is not good.  _

_ “How did we end up like this? How did I end up like this?” Raizel asks.  _

_ “What do you mean?” Peggy pretends that her voice doesn’t crack as she asks. She’s not expecting Raizel to answer, not really. She’s surprised when Raizel drops her chin and looks straight at her, eyes shining black in the low light of the kitchen and reflecting fire that’s flickering and popping in the fireplace, heating the cabin.  _

_ “I hurt you. I’ve hurt a lot of people but never like I hurt you. I hoped that being friends would have helped smooth it over. That we could have moved on. But that was stupid and naive in a way I had hopped I’d grown out of. When I broke it off, whatever the hell we were, I thought we’d heal. But cuts always leave scar tissue, don’t they?” Raizel says. “I’m sorry Peggy. I’m sorry I hurt you and I’m sorry I can’t help with your mission. You should stay until dawn at least. Let the ice on the road melt some before you get on the road. The guest room is open,” Raizel tells her, and turns back to the soup. Peggy stares at her back for a long time.  _

_ “You’re a good person, Raizel. You didn’t have a choice with all those people you hurt.”  _

_ “I did with you. I should have handled it better, or I shouldn’t have done it all,” Raizel says.  _

_ “And where would we have ended up?” Peggy asks her. Raizel shrugs, and Peggy continues, “I never would’ve left SHIELD. You don’t want to leave your farm. We’re running in two different directions, always have been. You could’ve handled it better, yes but we were destined to take two different forks in the road.” Raizel looks at Peggy. Something seems softer in her face. Guarded still, but softer.  _

_ “You’re a good woman, Peggy Carter,” she says eventually, and turns back to her soup. Quiet falls in the cabin, just the sound of fire crackling and Raizel cutting potatoes. _

_ “You need a sheep on this farm,” Peggy mutters. Raizel snorts, her mouth twisting in amusement but not quite forming a smile.  _

_ “I’ll make a note of that,” she says.  _

***

“I shouldn’t be encouraging this.” Tony looks up at the voice, and sees Raizel standing there holding out a cup of coffee. Tony takes it. 

“Thanks,” Tony croaks out. He didn’t realize he’d been holed up for so long in his lab, long enough to make his throat dry and croaky. Raizel sits on the table and scoots her butt back so she can lean forward and rest her elbows on her knees without falling forward off the table. 

She’s holding a cup of coffee also. He takes a sip of the coffee. She got the combination of cream and flavored creamer right, the kind he only uses on special occasions that don’t include staying up way too late in his lab. He didn’t know she even paid attention to any of the team besides Barnes. 

It didn’t help that no one had bothered to explain who she was. However, he was pretty sure the reason no one had explained was because no one knew who she was. 

“You said you knew who killed my parents. And why.”  _ Damnit _ , Tony thinks to himself. That wasn’t how he wanted to start the conversation. She nods once. 

“Yes.” She has the courtesy to look him in the eye. 

“Who was it? Why?” He asks. 

“They did it because your father was a smart man. A man dedicated to Steve Rogers. Hydra killed your parents, Tony. Do you know what Hydra does to people?” She asks. “Beyond kill them, I mean.” He shakes his head. She looks at him, breathes in and out once. “I… uh.” She looks down, breaks eye contact for the first time. Swallows. Her fingers are white around her cup of coffee. There’s slight ripples in the coffee, betraying the tremor in her hands she’s trying to disguise by keeping her fingers wrapped around the cup. 

“I got pregnant. While I was… with Hydra. While I was Hydra. Because I messed up. And they found out cause you can’t hide it forever, right?” A shiver runs through her, and Tony watches in horror. He isn’t sure what’s coming, but he knows it’ll punch him in the face regardless.

“They cut my baby out of me. I have the scar to prove it if you don’t believe me.” Her voice wavers, before hardening as she tells him about the scar. She won’t look at him. “Never assume anyone who’s with Hydra has a choice. Because we didn’t,” she grinds out. Tony feels nauseated. 

“I’m so sorry,” he whispers. She swallows. Straightens her spine. Looks him in the eye again. 

“James Buchanan Barnes didn’t have a choice when he killed your parents, Tony. He…” she takes a deep breath. “Well, that’s his story I guess. I hope he doesn’t remember it,” she says. Tony feels like the ground has split open under his feet, and he’s stuck in a free fall. She opens her mouth, then changes her mind and closes it. She slides off the table and stands up.

Tony can’t look at her face, can’t see her eyes, can’t reconcile that she’s right, that Bucky isn’t to blame for his parents’ death, not really. He looks up and watches once she’s turned and is walking away. He recognizes the way her shoulders hunch and her spine curves. It’s someone trying to crawl into themselves, to disappear. He knows that look all too well. 

***

Sam isn’t a fan of working with strangers. The devil you know, he thinks. Fury hadn’t given him a choice, though. Just nodded as the woman, Raizel was her name, who’d be hanging around the compound for the last few weeks swept onto the quinjet, face looking murderous. She hadn’t said a word as the plane had taken off, or as Sam had told her about the mission. 

“Is it me you hate, or something else?” She glances up at him from the map she’s studying. 

“It’s not you,” she growls.

“Ok, so what then? Or is it just a wild distaste for life and human existence?” She snorts, and gives Sam a look that says she’s assessing him. She sits up a little straighter, and sighs. 

“SHIELD and I go back a ways. A long time. It’s not a pretty history,” she tells him. 

“Gonna elaborate?” He asks. He watches as she smoothes out her face. 

“You have to be at least a level four friend before you can unlock my tragic backstory,” she tells him. Sam feels his eyebrows raise. 

“You rate your friends on a level scale?” He asks. She snorts, and her mouth twists like it’s thinking about smiling. 

“I’m giving you shit, Wilson,” she tells him. Sam huffs, and grins at her. 

“How old are you anyway? You seem real cozy with Barnes, and I think Rogers and Romanoff know a whole lot about you but they’re not spilling anything,” Sam asks. She watches him for a moment, like she’s assessing and evaluating. The humor drops from her face. 

“Too old to be doing this,” she says. Sam isn’t sure what to make of that. 

Then later, she uses one of the guards as a cushion for her shoulder as she breaks down a door, and another one she sends flying through drywall, and Sam thinks he might be a little bit in love. 

***

Steve is honestly a little surprised that the door is cracked open. He knocks anyway, and is rewarded with a distracted,

“Come in.” The room is, in a lot of ways, exactly what he expected. Bed made with military straight corners, no pictures of family, friends, or pets on the walls. The desk, however, looks a little like chaos. There’s paper files, that look like military files, splayed open on the right side while a large map of what he thinks is Pakistan takes up the left side. There’s scribbled notes, and dots across the map. 

“Where the fuck did my pencil go?” She mutters, patting her hand across the desk in the hope that she’ll find it under the papers. 

“Is it the one in your hair?” He asks. Her hair has been haphazardly twisted into a bun with a pencil shoved through it. 

“No, I was biting one,” she mutters, leaning forward to glare at the map. “What do you need?” She asks without looking up. Steve shakes his head.   
“Dinner. Are you hungry?” He asks. She shakes her head. “It’s kind of tradition. Friday night Family Night thing,” he adds. Apparently the wrong thing to add, because her face hardens. 

“I’m not hungry. Have fun at dinner,” she says, grabbing the pencil off the corner of her desk where the end was peeking out from under a file and scribbling down a note on the map with it. Steve thinks the language she’s writing in might be Polish, but he isn’t sure. She pulls her phone out, and starts dialing a number. Steve nods once, and leaves. 

***

_ There’s blood all over the ground, over the suit, covering Raizel’s hands. Having at least one bullet in the chest will do that to a person, she supposes. The door to the barn creaks.  _

_ Fear, no not fear, but something similar, something cold and sharp crawls up her spine.  _

_ Dread.  _

_ Inevitability.  _

_ Terror. _

_ Raizel feels her muscles tense, fingers curl. The barn door slowly opens. Light fades in and out. She’s pretty sure it’s cause of blood loss. The woman who enters the barn looks startled, snaps out angry sounding words in a language that Raizel doesn’t understand.  _

_ “I won’t hurt you,” Raizel tells her. She’s not sure if she says it in French or Polish. She supposes it doesn’t really matter since the chance of someone speaking either of those languages in a random barn in some African country is pretty slim.  _

_ Raizel isn’t sure where in Africa she is, which is a bad sign. She’s pretty sure she’s crossed at least one international border. She can’t get a good look at the woman, and the bullet that shattered in her thigh and cracked her femur is putting a bit of a damper on moving.  _

_ “I promise. Won’t hurt you,” Raizel mutters, and then starts coughing. Agony shoots through her, screaming from bullet wound to bullet wound, from the one in her stomach to the one in her chest down to the one in her leg and the one in her shoulder.  _

_ She isn’t sure how she survived to get to the barn. She’s pretty sure she doesn’t want to remember. She closes her eyes, hears the woman yell, but it’s distant like she’s yelling through a wall.  _

_ Raizel feels hands on her, fingers tightening around her arms, pushing on her leg and stomach. She tries not to scream. She’s not sure if she succeeds or not.  _

_ When she opens her eyes again, it’s dark. The gentle pulling when she moves tells her that there’s stitches where bullets used to be. That her body is mostly healed now.  _

_ The wave of nausea she gets when she sits up confirms that theory, especially when paired with the dull ache in her abdomen. Healing is taxing on a normal human. At the accelerated rate her body performs the task, it’s practically debilitating.  _

_ She rips off a strip of fabric from the sheet spread over her legs. Her head still feels foggy, and she’s pretty sure it’s because of blood loss and anesthesia from the surgery but she’s not sure so she gently picks at the tape near her inner elbow, and pulls the IV in the crease of her elbow out. She wraps the strip of sheet around it, and tucks in the ends. The IV she shoves under the mattress to let it continue giving the fluid, just not to her.  _

_ She glances around, recognizes the beige walls as a hospital. A decided improvement from places she’s woken up before. She twists to look over her shoulder and sees the monitor. The slow, almost too slow, heart rate looks normal to her. The temperature sensor in the catheter that she has in is telling her that she’s running a fever. Or, it would be a fever if Hydra hadn’t given her the serum that they did. For her, 102 degrees is pretty baseline. Catheter needs to come out next, she decides, and pulls her gown up to go after it. She rips off the tube used to inflate the balloon, and watches the water drain out. When she’s pretty sure it’s all out, she takes a deep breath and pulls the catheter out.  _

_ The biggest problem with waking up in what appears to be an ICU, she decides, is that as soon as she pulls the monitor wires off, the staff will descend to force her down and put them back on. Which is most decidedly not going to happen.  _

_ She twists over the side of the bed, and turns off the bed alarm before swinging her legs over. The agony that had been shooting up her leg before is simply a dull ache now. She walks carefully to the window, and pulls back the curtain.  _

_ The hospital appears to be a square, approximately five stories tall and in the middle is a large, plant filled courtyard. Beyond the top of the hospital Raizel can see buildings, lit up from the inside, and the deeper black of mountains beyond them. Barely visible are stars in the sky. Her internal compass tells her that she’s looking northeast.  _

_ The window has a crank at the bottom, which makes a quiet groan of complaint as she turns it, but the window slides open nicely.  _

_ The night air is warm, heavy and balmy with the idea of an impending rain storm. Raizel takes a deep breath. She pulls the hospital gown around her and ties it closed. She whips around when the door opens, and the woman standing there looks startled that Raizel is standing.  _

_ “Didn’t expect you to be up and around so soon,” she says in French. She sounds sincere Raizel thinks. Well, almost. Raizel can see the guard standing outside her room in the dimly lit hallway. The guard turns and steps into the room.  _

_ “What’s your name?” The woman in scrubs, a nurse Raizel assumes, asks.  _

_ “What does it matter? I assume some lab took blood,” Raizel tells her. The nurse shifts and the guard looks at Raizel like she’s waiting to hit her.  _

_ It’s only three stories from the window to the ground, Raizel notes. She’d survive the jump without any major complications.  _

_ “They did,” the nurse says. “My name is Apunda. This is Okoye. She’s here…” _

_ “For my protection? Don’t spew that crap at me. Tell me what you found in the blood,” Raizel growls. Apunda swallows.  _

_ “Your cells divide and reproduce faster than anything naturally possible. Your baseline body temperature is 102. Your heart rate is astronomically low, which makes no sense given the rest of it. When I looked at your surgical sites they were practically healed. None of that should be possible,” Apunda tells her. Raizel feels her face harden, muscles tighten as adrenaline rushes into her system. She sees Apunda’s eyes flick to monitor, knows her heart rate jumped up.  _

_ “I’m sure you all find that fascinating, don’t you?” Raizel says, feels a sneer pull at her lips. “You seem nice. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I’ll let you do your job and make sure my surgeries healed, but if you try to keep me here, if you try to keep me around as a pet science project, or a pin cushion, I will kill anyone who stands between me and the way out,” Raizel warns her. Apunda nods.  _

_ “I understand and I hear you. However, there are some questions you’re going to have to answer before you leave.” Raizel tilts her head and glares at the nurse.  _

_ “Who’s asking the questions?” Raizel demands. Apunda looks at Okoye. Okoye clears her throat.  _

_ “You will answer to King T’Chaka of Wakanda,” Okoye says. She glares at Raizel, like she’s daring her to move. Raizel feels a knife sliding down her spine, a warning and a desire to run.  _

_ “Then you better tell him to hurry up. I have unfinished business,” Raizel growls.  _

_ “He will get here when he can,” Okoye tells her. Raizel reaches up and calmly takes off the monitor wires and blood pressure cuff.  _

_ “Tell him to hurry up. Tell him he’s running out of time,” she warns.  _

_ “You said you’d wait for us to do our job,” Apunda reminds her. Raizel turns to look at her. Raizel remembers the gleam in Joseph Stalin’s eyes when Hydra had presented her to him. She remembers the way powerful men use beautiful women, and sneers at the nurse and guard in front of her.  _

_ “I’ve healed. I have better things I could be doing,” she snaps. The two women look at each other and then back to Raizel.  _

_ “I’ll let him know,” Okoye promises her.  _

_ *** _

_ T’Challa remembers the first time he saw Raizel. The woman was storming down the palace hall with Okoye in nothing but a hospital gown and a sweater. She reminded him of a black panther, all power and steel wrapped up in velvet and silk.  _

_ “You wanted to talk to me. Apparently you had some questions,” she had snapped at T’Chaka. T’Challa had been surprised at her blatant disrespect. As had everyone in the room.  _

_ Now, he knows better. With Raizel Solecki you must earn your title and your respect.  _

_ Now she’s standing, arms crossed, glaring at the jungle in front of her like it’s personally offended her.  _

_ “That went well,” T’Challa tells her. There’s a slight spattering of blood across the white of her uniform. She hadn’t put up too much of a fight when Shuri has insisted on redoing the uniform, but she had dug her heels in and insisted on white. She wouldn’t explain why. She wouldn’t explain a lot of things. T’Challa wonders if she explains them to his father. Or Ramonda. If she doesn’t, he wonders if she carries them inside her like a graveyard, or a monument to the horrors she’s survived.  _

_ “No, it didn’t,” she tells him. T’Challa frowns at her.  _

_ “Only one person died,” he says. She tilts her head up and takes a deep breath.  _

_ “Yes. A life lost is no small matter, Prince T’Challa, regardless as to how cruel and vicious that life might be,” she tells him. T’Challa frowns. _

_ Everything that had happened had gone well. None of the hostages were injured. None of the Dora Milaje were injured. T’Challa wasn’t hurt, and he’s pretty sure Raizel isn’t but he also knows that she wouldn’t tell him if she was.  _

_ “What do you know about life and death?” He asks her. The woman looks barely older than twenty. She turns to look at him and has a slight frown on her face.  _

_ “Okoye didn’t tell you?” She asks. T’Challa frowns.  _

_ “Tell me what?” He asks. She looks surprised, but shakes her head.  _

_ “Nothing. It doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago,” she tells him. T’Challa frowns and watches as she walks back towards the Dora Milaje.  _

_ Raizel had taken to the spear the Dora Milaje use after Okoye had convinced her to try it, and Raizel had imbedded a spear three feet into the stone floor of a courtyard. As far as T’Challa knew, it was still there.  _

_ Watching Raizel interact with the women, he thinks Okoye might be her only friend and he thinks that she must be terribly, terribly lonely.  _

_ “You’re getting sentimental in your old age,” T’Challa hears Okoye tell her. Raizel can’t be over twenty, T’Challa thinks to himself. It must be a joke. Raizel shakes her head.  _

_ “Not sentimental,” she tells Okoye. “Tired.”  _

***

The first time Bucky convinces Raizel to get into bed with him, he’s pretty sure he’s dreaming the whole time. The trust and the faith that she puts in him, the fact that she lets him lead, it all seems too good to be true. 

But then he rolls over in the morning, and she’s still there, bordering between sleep and wakefulness, and she gives him a soft sleepy smile and Bucky feels his stomach wrench because god fucking damnit he’s pretty sure he knows what that overflowing feeling in his chest is and he’s pretty sure it’s love. He loves Raizel Solecki and he’s sure she doesn’t love him back. 

“What’re frowning about?” She murmurs, reaching up to push her fingers along the scrunched skin between his eyebrows. 

“Nothing,” he murmurs. She frowns, and presses closer to him, kisses his jaw. 

“You’re a terrible liar, Barnes,” she murmurs and cups his jaw. He doesn’t like the way she looks at him, the way she seems to see straight through him. She has a little frown on her face. 

“Hey, blue eyes tell me what’s going on,” she murmurs. Bucky swallows, takes a deep breath. 

“I had a realization. One that scares me,” he tells her. He wraps his arms tighter around her, and rests his forehead against hers. 

“Nothing you say is going to scare me,” she tells him. He closes his eyes anyway, and whispers those three words to her. Three little words that have the ability to crush him. He’s surprised when they come out in Russian. I love you. Three little words.

He feels her stop breathing, her ribs stop expanding and contracting. 

“Bucky,” she whispers. She sounds heartbroken. “Why did you choose me? I left you with them. It took me so long to finally drag you out. I could have spared you so much pain and instead I was…” she chokes off and closes her eyes, makes a sound of pain. 

“I chose you because I love you. Because you see me, bad parts and all, and you don’t care,” he tells her. He feels her hand slip up from where it was resting on his shoulder to twist into his hair, hard, and press his forehead harder against hers. 

“I love you, Bucky Barnes,” she whispers. “Bad parts and all.” He kisses her hard. 

***

_ Anton Pretorius is shaking, cowering against the wall as Raizel leans over him, eyes blazing with fury. Ramonda is sure that if Raizel didn’t have that horrible mask on, she’d be snarling. In that moment Ramonda feels a strange kind of kinship with Raizel. _

_ Ramonda sees the monster in the lady, and she understands. So when Raizel steps back, and Anton has the audacity to tell Ramonda he loves her, Ramonda punches him in the face.  _

_ Safe on the jet back to Wakanda, Raizel doesn’t take the mask off. Ramonda sees her hands shaking. She reaches to unhook the mask, and Raizel flinches away. Ramonda pulls her hands back.  _

_ There’s demons hiding in Raizel’s past, ghosts inhabiting the scars laid into her skin. Ramonda doesn’t know what they are, and she doubts anyone else does either, but she steps back anyways.  _

_ “We won’t hurt you,” she tells her. Raizel doesn’t respond and Ramonda isn’t sure if it’s because she can’t or won’t.  _

_ Ramonda reaches out slowly, and when Raizel doesn’t flinch away she gently squeezes Raizel shoulder.  _

_ “We will not hurt you. You can always find a safe harbor in Wakanda. We will always open our arms to you.” She sees something give in Raizel’s eyes, but the woman simply drops her chin. Ramonda moves to the front of the plane where T’Challa is waiting to fly them home. He glances at her and then at Raizel.  _

_ “You two might be good for healing each other,” he tells her. She swallows and pulls the blanket he had given her when she boarded the plane tighter around her shoulders.  _

_ “Maybe,” she tells him.  _

_ *** _

Raizel grunts as Bucky grabs her hair and pulls her backwards, slams her on the ground. She twists around, grabbing the meet of his thumb and pulling, breaking his grip. She throws him against the wall and turns, sprinting down the hall. She hears him following her, but she’s surprised when he catches her, yanking her around. She trips over her feet and slams over the railing. 

She doesn’t scream when the rebar slams through her body, but it’s a close thing. She coughs, feels blood run out of the corner of her mouth. Bucky jumps over the rails, lands hard next to her. He tilts his head, and stares blankly at her. She tries to take a deep breath. It doesn’t work.

“Cmon, Bucky. You remember me,” she whispers. Even she can hear her breath rattling around the rebar in her lung. This isn’t the end, far from it, but it sure hurts like hell. 

She’s surprised that he lets her grab his hand. 

“You found me lying in the road.” She swallows, and it tastes like iron and rust. She pushes his hand down into her pants, lets it rest on her lower stomach where he can feel the jagged scars. The skin is slick with blood. 

“You remember,” she growls, “what they took from us.” She sees the Winter Soldier slowly fade, Bucky glancing at her, at the three pieces of rebar sticking out of her, and the horror slowly sliding onto his face like a sickening dawn. 

“James Buchanan,” she mutters, tightening her fingers around his wrist, “the only thing I see as unforgivable in this situation is if you don’t get me off this rebar right the fuck now,” she mutters. He barks out what he thinks was supposed to be a laugh.

“That’s going to fucking hurt,” he tells her. She gets a sudden clarity in her eyes that worries him, and her hand tightens around his wrist hard enough that he feels bones grind together. 

“No one is taking you from me again, do you understand? No one,” she’s staring at him, frowning, as if she’s willing him to feel the force and truth behind her words. “You’re stuck with me,” she whispers, her grip loosening as she lets her head fall back.

Bucky lurches forward, and starts pulling her off the rebar. 

***

Raizel looks pissed, corners of her mouth pulled down, brows furrowed, Bucky can even see the muscle in her jaw twitching. Bucky thinks she’s almost mad enough that her eye is about to start twitching, too. If she was a cartoon, steam would be blowing out her ears. 

“I think it’s a reasonable…”

“No.” Raizel’s pissed enough that she has her arms crossed, the tattooed number of 65213 with the triangle underneath on her arm on full display. Normally, she hides it. Will bend over backwards to keep it hidden but not now. 

Standing here, with Bucky, Steve, T’Challa, Ramonda and Shuri though she’s too caught up in being furious. For him, of course, because as far as he can tell not much else makes her ready for war like he does. 

“Raizel. I couldn’t live with myself if I hurt you again. Let them do this. Let them help. I know you want to fix everything but you can’t. Let them help.” The Russian feels familiar rolling off his tongue and he hopes to a god that he doesn’t believe in that no one else besides Raizel speaks Russian. 

He watches her tense, the late afternoon sun throwing highlights across the room that spill at her feet. She looks good in the dress she’s wearing, bright splashes of color spattered across the cloth she’s wrapped around her into a dress. She doesn’t say anything, mouth pulling down. He sees the fight leave her, replaced with a flash of fear and defeated acceptance. 

“I can’t watch them…” she stops, takes a deep breath, and slowly lets it out. 

“You can’t watch them put me under,” he finishes. No one seems surprised at their conversation in Russian, all simply standing around waiting for them to make a decision. She nods once, tense and ready to fight. 

“That’s ok. I wouldn’t ask you to.” She looks at him and looks sad. He gives her a watery smile. She nods once more. 

“I don’t like it. But I’ll see you on the other side,” she tells him. He watches her walk away, and it still feels like a punch in the gut. 

“Cryo will give us time to get it out of your head. We’ll take good care of you,” Shuri assures him. He nods once. 

“And I doubt Raizel will let anyone near you,” Ramonda tells him. Bucky nods once.

“Yeah. I know she won’t,” he tells her. 

***

_ Tony rocks forward onto the balls of his feet while Raizel squints at the greenhouse, hands on her hips.  _

_ “I don’t get it,” she says, head tilting to the side as she analyzes the building. Tony feels his eyes roll. For someone who’s been around a long time, if anyone’s sure how long no one’s sharing, she’s amazingly dense when it comes to emotions.  _

_ “I know you hate the compound. You tolerate it because Bucky’s here, but you take off running back to your cabin or off to whatever you do for a day job the second you get a chance. It’s a greenhouse,” he tells her. She tilts her head at it, then looks to Tony, then back to the greenhouse.  _

_ “You built that. For me. Because you decided that me running out of here like my ass was on fire meant I didn’t like it here,” she says.  _

_ “Yeah,” Tony tells her even though it wasn’t a question. “But it’s not just you ducking it every chance you get. You can barely look at the stone walls, and the glass makes you flinch when you think no one is looking. You always wear socks on your feet because the floors are cold which makes your face pinch up because you don’t have as much traction and you hate feeling out of control,” he tells her. He stops before he starts again because she’s looking at him in a way that makes him very uncomfortable, like she’s staring right through him, seeing him down to the bone.  _

_ “Do you always pay such close attention to your friends, Tony?” She asks and her voice is soft. Gentle. He doesn’t think he’s heard her be gentle before. She probably has, with Bucky, but whatever history they have, they keep behind closed and locked doors.  _

_ “Yeah,” he says, rolling his shoulders and glancing at his feet. He suddenly feels like a kid again, presenting his A+ science report to his mother. An odd sensation, given that physically he looks older than Raizel by probably twenty years.  _

_ Tony jerks as he feels her collide with him, arms squeezing around his shoulders. He’s more than taken aback with her uncharacteristic display of affection.  _

_ “Thank you,” she mutters. “For being my friend.” Tony gapes and notices that her face is bright red as she steps back. She clears her throat, nods, and stalks off muttering something about needing vegetable plants, linden flowers, and making sure any security footage of that moment were destroyed. Tony stands gaping for a long time before he turns and walks back towards the compound.  _

***

Raizel likes Wakanda at night. She enjoys being able to stare at the stars without wind whistling hard enough to whip tears out of her eyes with the force of it, without feeling like her skin is frozen and going to peel off. 

She doesn’t expect Tony to visit, not after the whole HYDRA-codewords-Bucky-tried-to-kill-her shit, and especially not this late. But, he stands next to her in the middle of the field regardless. 

“I don’t know what you did for the Royal family but I thought they were going to go full Vlad the Impaler and put me on a stake in their front lawn when I asked to know where you were,” he tells her. She feels the corner of her mouth that’s facing away from him twitch. “I think Okoye might come storming your house in the morning if you don’t tell her you’re ok.”

She’s too occupied with Bucky in cryo, with remembering his face frozen behind glass, with remembering slick, black ice and the taste of iron in her mouth, rust red spreading on Bucky’s skin, the way they forced him into the chair. The screaming. 

“He’s going to be ok,” Tony tells her. She turns to look at him then, mildly horrified that her eyes are hot in the way that suggest she’s tearing up. 

When she’d first met Tony, she hadn’t expected that they’d become friends, and close ones at that. But here he is, halfway around the world, standing in her field with her and her goats and her memories that she won’t share at two thirty in the morning. 

“Objectively…” she swallows and shakes her head. Tony frowns at her, at the tears she can feel threatening to spill over. She looks out over the field. “I can’t lose him, Tony. Not again. And everytime I see him like that I think of everything they did,” she spits out the word “they” like it’s poison on her tongue. 

“You remember what you two survived,” Tony tells her. She crosses her arms, and works her jaw as she pointedly ignores the tears that have slipped down her face. She doesn’t say anything. In the moonlight Tony can see the dark ink on her arm. 65321 spelled out, the point of the triangle underneath with the point situated between the 5 and the 3. 

“I think I know what those numbers mean, and if they mean what I think they mean then you’ve been around for a very long time and you’ve seen some pretty dark shit. I can’t imagine what HYDRA was like but I looked through some of the files and I found…” Tony stops and she looks at him, face etched with decades of grief. 

“There’s a lot of things to find, Tony. At least give me something to work with,” she tells him. 

“You were pregnant. While at HYDRA. You told me that but there was a video...” He sees the door slam closed, sees that horrible, horrible blankness slide onto her face. He sees it sometimes when she comes back from finding people, when she doesn’t get the ending she wants. It scares him every time how far gone she can get. He thinks Bucky is the one thing that keeps her finding her way back. 

“Was,” she whispers. 

“What I’m trying to say now is that you’re both victims. I get that. I don’t blame you for my parents death. I did for a while but not anymore. Not after,” he stops, and stares at Raizel. She’s got tears running down her face, arms wrapped tight as a vice around her, teeth sinking into her bottom lip as she tries to not make a sound. 

Tony doesn’t think, he just acts, not exactly out of line for him, but he’s glad that Raizel doesn’t jerk back, or react in some other more violent manner to him hugging her. She doesn’t say anything about the reactor digging into her skin either, just slowly wraps her arms around his waist. 

“Bucky will be fine. You two will be fine,” Tony tells her. She doesn’t respond, just tightens her arms around him. 

***

_ The second time Bucky convinces Raizel to get into bed with him, he does approximately zero percent of the convincing. She just curls her fingers through his, smiles softly at him, and nods her head towards the bedroom.  _

_ He lets her lead, and she rides him, dragging her nails down his ribs.  _

_ “You’re mine,” she growls, dragging her teeth across his skin, over the bones and muscle behind which his heart resides. His heart that belongs to her. “No one is ever taking you from me again.” Bucky nods, grabbing her hips as his toes curl.  _

_ “Yeah,” he tells her. “I’m yours.”  _

***

Raizel is more than pissed that Bucky gets pulled out of cryo and less than two weeks later they’re standing on a battlefield again. She understands that this is a fight that needs all hands on deck. It’s not the first time she’s been told that, though. 

The swarm of aliens is pretty convincing for an all-hands-on deck scenario since she feels that statement needs some back up. She glances at Bucky, he shrugs, and suddenly they’re in the middle of death and destruction. 

Of course, as battlefields do, it ends in ash. 

Raizel watches as her body slowly disintegrates, blows away on the gentle Wakandan wind, and has two thoughts. She hopes Bucky finds some peace, and she hopes to a god she's not sure she believes in anymore that she can rest now. 

It’s been a long time coming. 

***

It shouldn’t surprise Raizel that she’s pulled out of death and onto a battlefield. 

She’s surprised they win, and she’s surprised that she survived the fight given how disoriented and out of control she feels. She watches in horror, too far away to help, as Steve lunges towards Tony, as he grabs at the red armor as Tony snaps. The shock wave runs across the battlefield, and the aliens slowly start turning to dust. They won. Raizel takes a breath, and holds it. 

She closes her eyes, and for the first time in a long time, she prays.

“For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways,” she whispers. 

***

Tony blinks awake into the low light of the hospital room. He glances over at the shape in the chair next to his bed. 

“Raizel?” He croaks. Her head snaps up, and she offers him half a smile. 

“Hey. Feel like shit?” She asks. He snorts, and appreciates that she doesn’t ask if he feels ok.

“Yeah,” he croaks. She’s already pushing herself out of the chair. 

“Need pain meds? Water? More pillows?” She asks. 

“Water?” He asks her. She nods once. 

“I’ll go ask.” And then she’s gone and Tony’s left reeling as it sinks in through the haze that Raizel had been dead for five years and he just let her walk out of the room. 

She comes back in moments later with a glass of water. 

“Come here,” Tony demands, and she raises an eyebrow at him as she sets the water on his table, leaning her hip against his bed. 

“Where are Pepper and Morgan?” He asks. 

“I sent them home,” Raizel says as Tony takes a drink of water. “They’re no good for you if they’re too sleep deprived themselves,” she tells him. He nods once. 

“You were dead,” he tells her. She sighs and pokes at his knee until he shuffles his legs over far enough for her to sit next to him on the bed. 

“I was. For five years,” she tells him. He swallows, rubs his hand over his face. 

“You know what we all need once everything settles down a little more?” She asks. Tony looks at her and tilts his head. 

“What?” 

“A really fucking good therapist.” Tony can’t help the shattered glass bark that jumps out of his chest that’s supposed to be a laugh. He tries not to think about the place where his right arm used to be. He thinks about Morgan instead. 

***

Bucky doesn’t like the odd muted greyness that has settled between him and Raizel. It makes him feel like something has broken between them, something he can’t fix. 

It comes to a boil one night when the Avengers, the new Avengers the ones who survived, the ones who look young enough to be the grown young adult versions of that baby he and Raizel lost to Hydra, are called on to go fight an unidentified something on the western coast of Mexico. 

“No,” Raizel interrupts Sam. Everyone stops and looks at her. “No,” she repeats as she takes a step back and holding her hands in front of her, like she’s holding them up in surrender, or warding them off. “I’m done. I’d rather walk back into Auschwitz than another fight. I’m fucking done.” She glances at Bucky, then turns and walks towards the door. 

“You can’t just walk away from this stuff,” Sam tells her. She turns around and she doesn’t look ready to fight, she just looks tired. 

“Why the hell not? I’ve already given my three children to men who wanted to use me to fight their battles for them. I gave you my life in Wakanda. I have nothing more to give you. Stop asking me to.” With that, she turns and walks away. Bucky watches her go, and feels like deciding to follow her or stay here isn’t a trivial decision. He looks at Sam, mutters an apology, and takes off after Raizel. 

***

“I don’t want to think,” she whispers against his neck, hands shaking as she pulls at his belt buckle. “I want to feel you every time I move for days.” They both know that that’s impossible, she’ll heal too fast for that, But he grabs her face anyway, makes her look at him. 

“Are you sure?” He asks. 

“Yes,” she gasps, leaning forward to press her mouth against his. The scent of the pine trees and the crisp fall air floating into Raizel’s cabin through the open window curls around them, through them. 

Bucky obliges her, and the table cracks as he slams her onto it, twisting her hair around his hand and yanking her head back. He hears the table crack and splinter under her hands as she wraps them around the edge. 

He doesn’t understand the Polish that comes tumbling out of her mouth, as their sweat-slicked bodies crash together again and again and again, but it makes something in him satisfied that he makes her revert back to it. 

The break the table that night, and the couch too. 

***

_ Wanda frowns at the woman in front of her, and who wraps her hands all the tighter around her coffee mug.  _

_ “They told me you can see people’s minds,” she says. Wanda nods once. The woman narrows her eyes.  _

_ “What does mine look like?” She asks. Wanda takes a deep breath, holds it. She thinks of the cold coming off the woman, how it’s root isn’t in her heart but her mind, she thinks about the fire whipped by Arctic wind on the icy tundra, how it keeps sparking back to life. She feels the crystal clarity of a frozen forest, waiting with bated breath for the eventual dawn of spring, the rush of water over stones underneath the thick winter ice on a river.  _

_ “A frozen forest waiting for the dawn of spring. A fire that won’t die even when buffeted by wind, water rushing under the frozen surface of a river. A deep, icy cold that doesn’t start in your heart,” she says. The woman raises her eyebrows. She opens her mouth. Closes it. She breaks eye contact and takes a drink of coffee.  _

_ “I always imagined it’d look like ash. A battlefield covered in bloody bodies. Any wrong step and a mine would go off,” she says. Wanda swallows, shakes her head.  _

_ “What happened to you?” Wanda asks her. The woman straightens from where she’s leaning on the counter, dark eyes slicing through Wanda as she watches her. She doesn’t look mean, Wanda thinks, just very watchful. Very observant.  _

_ “That’s the question of the hour, isn’t it?” She looks at Wanda with a challenge in her eyes. “Why don’t you just go dig for yourself?”  _

_ Wanda shakes her head harshly.  _

_ “No. No, I don’t do that,” she says. The woman drops her chin in acknowledgment.  _

_ “Ok,” she says.  _

***

Raizel and Bucky get married on a warm spring day, on almost a complete whim, because Bucky had asked and Raizel had said “Why the fuck not?” 

It wasn’t really a whim, because it had been a long time coming, something they had been slowly progressing towards ever since she had pulled him out of Hydra and back to the world, back to Steve and and safety and home and her, a progression that neither of them had bothered, or wanted, to stop. 

Raizel looks gorgeous, Bucky thinks. Retirement looks damn good on her. Radiant in the sun and glowing in the rain, finally earning some laugh lines to help compensate for the frown lines. 

The goats don’t care about the fact that their caregivers are now officially married, officially connected in a way that they have been emotionally for decades. 

Sam and Tony practically piss themselves when Raizel calls them, to ask Tony about a greenhouse she claimed, and flashed the plain, silver wedding ring on her left hand to the camera while gesturing. 

Bucky, of course, laughed until he cried and then kept laughing until he couldn’t breathe as Tony and Sam went running around the compound to show everyone while making Raizel stay on video with her wedding ring to prove that they weren’t hallucinating. 

Unsurprisingly the congratulations flowers they received two weeks later had a card that was signed “The Avengers”, but was very clearly written in Natasha’s handwriting. 

In the continuing trend of unsurprising events, the next card, hand delivered by Shuri who apparently simply wanted to see Raizel and Bucky’s reactions, was from Tony and included plane tickets and an all inclusive honeymoon trip to Costa Rica. 

“But what about the goats?” Raizel asks Bucky, frowning slightly as she turns to face him, which sends Shuri into fits of giggles. 

(As Raizel and Bucky hear much later when Peter and Morgan come spend the night with them while Tony and Pepper have a date night and one-night-alone-trip in Wakanda’s capitol, Shuri had taken a video of their reaction to Tony’s present, and it made its way around the compound. Peter then informed them that Raizel’s reaction had exploded across the internet and “but what about the goats?” had become a widely popular meme. Bucky and Raizel aren’t sure what a meme is, and at this point Raizel is too afraid to ask and Bucky is too proud to.) 


End file.
